Robert's Fourth Watch
  • Home
  • Reese's Revenge
  • Short Stories
    • A Faithful Conveyance
    • I Ain't You
  • 300 Words or Less
  • Poetry
  • Haiku-a-Day '16
  • A Time for Prayer
  • Thoughts and Prayers
  • '14 Reasons to See
  • Me

The Need to Nap with Our Butts in the Air

5/22/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
From a very early point in Reese’s life Mindy and I realized that in real ways she was not our child. Don’t get me wrong. Reese has Mindy’s nose and my feet. And, she is clearly ours since we have successfully imposed our taste in music and colleges upon her. But, Reese just doesn’t seem to act like us, at least in certain ways.

For one thing, Mindy and I like naps. But Reese has always napped only when there are no options for escape and her flesh finally fails her. Reese is so busy. Always has been.

When Reese was a baby, sometimes I would go into her room after she had succumbed to a nap. She’d be on top of her blankets with her backside in the air and her arms spread in haphazard fashion. Obviously she had wiggled out of her covers, sat up, and been busy until she collapsed and fell forward.

Even at six years of age the same thing still happens. We just get to add arguments with her in English about whether she should rest or not.

Reese doesn’t like to slow down. But we know she needs to. And that’s because she was designed to do so. Not by us, but by God. We know this. If she didn’t rest, life would become unhealthy and ultimately untenable. It is critical to her biology, psychology, and spirituality.

This is not particular to children. We know this, even though we so often work to deny it. We were all made to rest as surely as we were made to work. In the beginning of the book of Genesis days are counted like this: there was evening and there was morning, the first day. The day began when the people were at rest. And still the earth turned. We are not God, after all.

Also, a day of rest was perhaps the chief identity marker for God’s people Israel. To keep this day of rest and enjoyment, this Sabbath, was a way of affirming that people were not slaves but were made in the image of God.

I recall a cover article from US News and World Report from a number of years back. It considered the culture-wide American binge on caffeine.

Apparently in just the first few years of the previous decade the percentage of 18-24 year olds who drink coffee doubled from 16 to 31 percent. Energy drinks like Red Bull were suddenly a multi-billion dollar business. Beer (beer?!?!) was coming in caffeinated forms. Poison control centers were reporting growing numbers of caffeine overdose calls.

The article said that doctors were becoming concerned. Not that caffeine is an evil substance. In adults it seems to have a role in reducing the risk of Parkinson’s, a number of types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, and migraine headaches.

However, there were no studies on what it does to the growing legion of young bodies and brains it was entering in larger and larger amounts. And for anyone of any age, being strung out on something probably is probably not a good thing.

Keeping life rolling quickly may end up killing us slowly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 



Psalm 46 has that famous line in verse 10: “Be still, and know that I am God!” I think in the context there are two ways to take the line. One is of the “don’t worry” variety. Verses 1 and 2 do say after all, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”     

The other way of taking verse 10 we might call the “knock it off and shut the heck up” approach. I think it’s the reason the English translation ends verse 10 with an exclamation point. The Lord says in the Psalm, “Be still and know that I am God (because you aren’t)!”

Sometimes we rest from our labors and worries because we need not fear the pressures of life. God is with us. The first reading of verse 10.

Sometimes we rest because we need to remember that the role of God has already been cast, and we didn’t get the part. The second reading of verse 10.

Either way we need to rest as surely as we need to work. And we need to support each other in this pursuit because, sadly, it is a counter-cultural practice in a go-go-go-or-die America.

Work, play, and rest well, folks.



0 Comments

Baby Spit & Perspective Shifts

5/16/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Perspective matters in life. That’s not a shocking revelation. I know that. But it’s a revelation that I lose track of too often.

Back when Reese was a tiny baby we were driving to the grocery store. Mindy and I were in the front with Reese in the back. It was about Reese’s bedtime, and we knew she was tired.

Suddenly this noise started coming from Reese’s seat. Reese was gargling her spit. Oh, but there was more. Reese was also speaking high-pitched “words” in her baby language through the spit.

Her spit-phonics made this weird, primal noise that was too hard for me to create myself. I didn’t even want to try. In all honesty, it wasn’t a noise I think I ever want to replicate myself. But Reese was doing it over and over again. Spit-gargle-cooing. Getting into it.

So I said to the backseat, “Reese that’s disgusting.”

At about the same moment Mindy said, “Reese, honey. Jesus loves your singing.”

Perspective matters. And, not all perspectives are created equal. In that moment it was pretty clear that I had the worst perspective in the car – after both Mindy’s and Reese’s.

For a long stretch of time at a congregation I once served, every Sunday morning the city set up a speed trap right next to the entry into our parking lot. Every Sunday I’d pass it at seven in the morning I’d get irked. It bugged me. Sunday morning?! A speed trap at the church?! C’mon!

A friend in the congregation, not knowing my perspective, came up to me one Sunday morning and said, “Isn’t it nice the city put the ‘evil eye’ right next to us every Sunday. It’s kind of the police to make everybody slow down at the church campus and notice we’re here. Who knows? Maybe they’ll come on in and worship.”

Perspective matters. I liked my friend’s better than mine. Still do.

For some reason I can’t remember I was reading an editorial page of Christianity Today from November 2006. The editors cited a study from the American Sociological Review entitled “Social Isolation in America”.

The study claimed that the average American had three close-confidant friends in 1985 and only two in 2004. Further, those reporting no close friends jumped from 10% to 25%. Those reporting a circle of four or five close friends slipped from 33% to around 15%. The study noted that increasingly the close friends people did have were household members and not those from the broader community.

The editorial wondered how the church, “the new community, the friends of Jesus (John 15)," could make Jesus Christ present to a more and more lonely culture.

The editorial talked about all the huge effort and money congregations have spent on programs propelled by slick marketing, or on creating “authentic” high-tech worship services, or on seeking to relate the gospel to a postmodern culture.

What if, they wondered, there was a perspective shift?

What if the church mounted a campaign encouraging each member of the congregation to become a good friend to one or two people outside the congregation during the next year? A good friend who listened and cared just because it was an extension of Jesus’ call to love God and love neighbor. How would that type of perspective shift refocus the way we looked at ministry, at being a Christian?

I suppose allowing our perspectives to shift in important ways is simply part of being alive. And, as much as it pains me when my old, cherished perspectives prove unhelpful, I much prefer being alive to the alternative.

So, sing on, Reese! Sing on!



0 Comments

Life Without Baby

5/7/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
I remember a few months after Reese was born, Mindy took her to Indiana to visit Grandpa and Mimi (Mindy’s parents) for a week or so. It was the first time I had been without Reese, and I was surprised that I went through a measure of withdrawal.


Oh, I got all sorts of things done. In a number of ways life was easier.

For instance, I made a lot of headway on a backyard redesign without a 17-pound-wiggle-worm perched on my right arm. I was able to get paperwork done without having to beg a small someone every three minutes to stop shredding it. I got to go to a sports bar and watch the NBA playoffs without having to go through 35 steps to prepare infant gear.

On a surface level life was easier without her and more trouble with her. It certainly was less messy when Reese was gone. But life was not better.

*** Sometimes life was simply better when I would blow off productivity and play “Rip the Sunday Ads” with Reese on the living room floor, even if some of my paperwork got shredded by baby hands.

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reminds us that God wasn’t productive every day of the week. Play and rest are as much a part of God’s “plan” as work. And, if we are made in this God’s image, then the same sort of “plan” is likely intended for us as well.  

*** Sometimes life was simply better when I would sit there and be present with Reese and hear her first give the name “One Baba” to her favorite blanket.

Genesis reminds us that God gave Adam the honor of naming the animals. What fun that must have been. I got to see a hint of it there on the floor doing nothing with Reese and her Baba. But I could have missed it.

*** Sometimes life was simply better when in the evening, as an infant, Reese was tired and her defenses were down and she’d get the crazy giggles. In such moments any “peekaboo”-type surprises or “whakawhakawhaka”-like sounds would cause her to lose it. Mindy and I called such periods “Delirium,” and pushing Reese into them was great fun. She would never be the only one laughing.

Genesis reminds us that in the cool of the evening God walked the garden with his people. Surely this was a time of laughter as much as it was a time of prayer. Or perhaps laughter and prayer were two parts of the same coin.

It is often messy for Reese to be here, especially when a temper tantrum ruins a plan or disrupts a group. But it is better for her to be here. It is better to regularly “waste” time with her, to be in relationship with her. I would be less myself without her.

In Christian teaching there is the understanding of God as “Trinity.” Jesus says at the end of Matthew’s version of the gospel story, “Go and make disciples of all nations in the (singular) name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit….”

In Christian belief this understanding means that the one, true God of Heaven and Earth is not a lonely old man sitting atop some celestial mountain. God, to be truly “himself,” is a dynamic relationship of Three sharing honor, trust, mission, and life as One. God is a community, a relationship.

In Christian belief it is also said, through the words of Genesis, that we are created in the image of this God.

So it stands to reason that we are not created to be alone and isolated. We are created needing to share honor, trust, mission, and life with one another. In community we find the life of the one, true God who is a community of love.

Personally that means I need Reese, even as she needs me. I need others to be who I was made to be in the image of God.

Life may be easier without all the people (isn’t that the old joke?). It may often be messier with a community of blood or Spirit around us. But it is better. And, full life is not possible without it.

That’s why we can never do church just through a computer or a TV screen. None of us were designed to make it on our own.



0 Comments

    Author

    Robert here.



    This is something called a Reese Piece. Reese is a nickname for Karyssa, my daughter. 



    Each Reese Piece is a brief exploration of some way I sense God has spoken to me through her.

    God reaches us through the experiences and relationships of daily life. This seems obvious, but I find it’s something which is still easy for me to forget. 


    It is my prayer that “Reese Pieces” will encourage you to look for the ways the Lord is trying to reach you through the life you live each day and the people who populate it.

    Archives

    August 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly